


The Prince and the Corvid

by nocturnalboys



Category: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, M/M, Trans Male Character, crow! Hakuryuu, oracle! Judal, semi-canon, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 16:41:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9665942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocturnalboys/pseuds/nocturnalboys
Summary: Curses come in all different shapes and sizes. Sometimes it's curses, not blessings, that form the backbone of a life. A jinx for happiness, a execration for love, a hex for victory.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dragonofeternal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofeternal/gifts).



> This was written for Liz (@ dragonofeternal's) birthday!! I know they love The Princess and the Frog a lot so I wanted so write something that really captured the vibe of that :)

Once upon a time, in a castle to the north, held in shadow at the foot of a mountain-

Judal shook his head, groaning and flopping back on his silk bedding. He was bored as all hell, sure, but that didn’t mean he had to imagine his life as some kind of sappy children’s story. What were things coming to? 

It was a wet day outside, mist pooling in through the open window of Judal’s bedchamber. Normally he would be enduring some kind of lesson, but not even the brightest lanterns in the palace were enough to stave off the mist. The breakfast his servant left on his vanity was already cooled in the slight breeze, his cup of tea giving off only the faintest plume of steam. Normally, by now he would be training in the garden with his teachers, but fog made for poor archery conditions. He would have to wait until much later for some entertainment, his night teachers only visiting him after the sunset. 

He could make up a different story, perhaps. A less infantile one. This time around, he could be the hero, and save some poor defenseless peasants from a monster. Or he could be the monster! Ruling the world might be nice. He would have all the fruit and naps he could ever ask for, and never have to take poetry lessons again, and the Queen? She would…

What would she do? Judal’s mother was often fatigued and restless, and when she left her rooms, it was only to wander the empty paddies in the valley below, her slippered feet dislodging clouds of murk to swirl in the floodwater. There were often months where he saw her not at all, but he knew, somehow, that she still loved him deeply. For the time being, his teachers made suitable guardians. He decided that once he ruled the world, he would also give his mother infinite naps and fruit, like a good son should. 

If he was a monster, he would probably look something like a cat, but with fangs and wings. Possibly more than one pair of wings. Gods, how cool would that look?

He wasn’t very hungry, but after some time, he took his tray and sat on the windowsill, facing into the fog like the figurehead of a riverboat. Somewhere on the other side of valley, a family of cranes were making a ruckus. Repetitive though it was, the calling lulled Judal, until he felt almost like he’d fallen head-first into the fog himself. 

***  
The Unwilling Queen

Once upon a time, there was a family of rice planters, who lived deep in the jungle. There was a father, a mother, and a bevy of young children. Every day, regardless of rain or shine, the whole family went to the paddies to care for the rice crop. Whether it was planting shoots, chasing away pests, or harvesting the fruits of their labor, they did the work together. 

All except the youngest child, who the mother carried on her back while she worked. The baby was too young to plant or harvest. However, the child still had a talent to offer. A simple tug on the mother’s sleeves would alert her to danger in the paddies. Depending on the direction of the tug, she would always know where to step, and therefore avoid many poisonous serpents and insects. 

The family marveled at the child’s uncanny ability to know these things, but never questioned it. 

One summer night, just as the sun was setting, emissaries from the Kingdom of Secrets arrived in the forest. Even in the jungle darkness, they wore thick veils over their faces, to keep their identities a secret. Under the twilight buzz of wilderness, they spoke in whispers, to keep their mission a secret. Their leader, a great sorceress, had long foreseen the birth of an oracle in the lands to the south, and sent them to retrieve the child for their own purposes. 

In the pitch black night, the family met their end; one by one, until the mother, the child still on her back, was left alone. She ran through the trees, faster than she ever had, but the emissaries inevitably caught her. Seeing the fierceness with which the mother protected her child, one of the emissaries paused to offer her a deal. She could stay near the baby, if she allowed herself to be cursed. Under the curse she would become a puppet, unable to tell anyone about what had happened, but her child would become royalty, and learn the forbidden arts. 

What could she do? It was better to survive, even as a husk, to watch over the child. She agreed. 

The child with dark hair and russet eyes grew up not remembering anything of a family.

***

The day marched on, and the mist cleared, giving way to a glorious azure sky. In the front garden, Judal practiced his archery, then retired to the salon for poetry and grammar training, where he made significantly less progress. He found himself actually looking forward to his night lessons. While most times he found he couldn’t recall a thing about them, other nights his teachers would give him the most wonderful gifts, esoteric skills from beyond their veils. As the sun began to make its retreat, Judal settled back into his room for a brief practice session. Retrieving his kit from the cabinet, Judal chose his favorite tool; a scarred skin sack of bones. 

He could already feel the power tingling behind his eyes, in the joints of his fingers. Sitting cross, legged on the floor, he shifted the bag between his hands, gathering a darkness in them like a cat’s cradle. In one fluid motion, he undid the tie, upending the bag on the floor. 

Clattering, the bones regurgitated themselves onto the polished wood. Judal waited semi-patiently for them to stop moving, and when the last fragile skull stopped spinning, he opened his hands over the remains. The strings looped between his fingers sagged, snapping, hairline threads of shadow zig-zagging between bones like light caught in a prism. 

Judal personally preferred reading the near future to the distant. Things made more sense in the near, and he saw less that he’d want to unsee later. He followed the string from a hummingbird skull, to the cracked paw of a monkey, to a few scattered vertebrae, making a mental calculation. 

With this method, he didn’t so much see the future as prove it mathematically. He didn’t like arithmetic normally, but since this entailed no numbers, only logical theorems, it was easy to wrap his mind around. He could see something feathered; a collision; a messily inked letter; and last but not least, a royal crest marked with a dragon. 

What could that mean? The puzzle, the divining, could actually be quite fun once he put his mind to it. 

Suddenly, there was frenzied movement in the room, a sizeable black object dropping in from the open window and crashing into Judal’s vanity. Judal lurched backwards, his heart seizing, before he caught sight of the trail of feathers on the floor. His prediction was already coming true, he supposed, getting to his feet and cautiously approaching the bird where it lay among his trays of powdered makeup.

It was a corvid of some kind, and a very large one at that. It floundered on one side, flapping a wing clumsily, trying and failing to get itself to its clawed feet. Judal bent to look it in the eyes; they were dark, intelligent things, a hint of blue in the pupil. He laughed softly. “Hey, it’s okay, don’t be scared! I’ve got nothing against animals, I swear. Specially not hurt ones.”

The bird rasped out a caw in response, the frantic movements coming to a stop. Sedately, Judal lifted the feathered creature up, cradling it. Its pulse thrummed, high frequency, against his fingertips as he carried it to his bed, setting it down on the sheet. “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if you can hear me. Where does it hurt?” Judal asked, looking the corvid in the eyes once more.

Lifting its left wing, the bird clicked its beak. The feathers were bent roughly, like someone had grabbed the wing with two hands and twisted in opposite directions. “So you can understand!” Judal exclaimed, keeping his voice low. “Okay, two blinks for a boy bird, one blink for a girl bird. I’m not an expert, I couldn’t tell in a million years.”

After two blinks, Judal nodded, taking a roll of bandages and cutting off a thin strip with a fruit knife from his bedside. “Alright, now, I have zero medical experience, but I have a feeling I can do this right. Do you try me, mister bird?”

Following a long, skeptical look, the corvid lifted his wing, a guise of resigned patience coming over him. Using only the tips of his fingers, Judal shifted the fragile bones, winding the bandage around dexterously and securing it with his smallest hairpin. “How does that feel?

One caw, the bird dipping his head… in gratitude, perhaps? Judal smiled, helping him to his feet. “Stay here, okay? I need to go take my lessons for the night. I’ll bring you something good to eat if you don’t do anything crazy in here. If you’re gonna shit, try to do it out the window.”

Hopping back and forth on both legs, the corvid bowed again, clicking his beak. Taking that to mean he understood, Judal left a lantern burning for him, whisking himself out of the room feeling like a very good person, which wasn’t something he normally considered. 

***

The Wife of the Dragon

There was once a powerful young sorceress, a woman with great ambition and magical power, who dedicated her life to rising to new and greater heights. She travelled on and on through the mountains of the north, wielding her abilities in great spectacles. She accrued disciples, and eventually, became something of a queen. She ordered those in her kingdom to conceal their faces. It would be a Kingdom of Secrets, a nation-state with no homeland but everything to gain. 

But she still wanted more. More power, more glory. As she was passing over a plateau, frozen and brutal in winter, she took shelter with a group of herders, and it was from them she heard of the dragon that blessed and watched over the land. 

What if she could harness the deity’s power for herself? She thought, beginning to devise a plan. She could not enslave a god. But she could trick one. Searching near and far, she found the dragon’s shrine, left it an offering, and waited. 

When the dragon arrived, she used her powerful magic to disguise herself as one of his kind. She behaved coyly, speaking only in cryptic tongues, teasing the true god at every turn, and in infuriating him, he grew smitten. The dragon took the sorceress as the wife of his mountain land, and her masked secret keepers as his bureaucracy. 

Now, the sorceress felt, she had everything. She bore the god four children, all of them with dragon’s blood in their veins. 

As the years went on, as their kingdom grew in size and influence, that feeling waned. The sorceress began to feel slighted. This was her land. Her power. Her eldest sons were already neck in neck for the crown of the dragon king. The princess was skillful in both magic and leadership. The smallest child, not yet five years old, was soft and sensitive, and needed much handholding, but something gave the sorceress a feeling that things would change. 

She had no skill in divination, only theory. In the swampland to the far south, she could sense a powerful oracle, for whom potential omniscience lay in their hands. It was no small feat, but within the machinations of a newly conceived puppet state, she raised and groomed the young diviner. Within a year, her husband the dragon and her two eldest sons were returned to the earth. 

At last, she was the almighty ruler she had always dreamed of being.

***

As the days went on, Judal began to see the corvid as something of a familiar. Whenever he was in his chamber, the bird would hover over him, watching him work at his lessons or practice with makeup. His wing was still healing, so taking flight was out of the question, but Judal tried to make his grounded life as comfortable as possible. Each night, he snuck food from the table in his robes, leaving it on his vanity for the bird to eat. If it got cold, night wind creeping through cracks in the architecture, he would allow the bird to huddle with him under his covers. 

He didn’t give the corvid a name. It didn’t seem right, seeing as he got to choose his own name, and since he seemed intelligent, it was only fair that he got to pick his own name too, even if Judal would never know it. 

The bird even tried to help him, on occasion. Whenever Judal was practicing his poetry, he would stand on the open scroll, nudging Judal’s hands in the right directions to form characters. If Judal couldn’t sleep, a frequent occurrence, the bird would amuse him, bringing him shiny treasures from the garden below; his keen eyes could spot baubles, even in near darkness. Judal quickly amassed a collection, loose earrings and mica scaled stones rattling about in a box underneath his bed. 

The pattern broke when, on one hazy night, Judal was late for his lessons, and his teachers came up to his room to escort him. Upon seeing the masks, the corvid grew paralyzed with fear, nesting himself inside Judal’s dresser drawer until the dawn, when Judal found him there, shivering and afraid. No amount of coaxing or petting his feathers would soothe him. Perhaps it would be better to leave his new friend be for a little while. Using his fanciest robes, Judal put together a real roost, nestling the covid in a bed of silk. 

After long hours, he relaxed, and when Judal saw him next, he was napping safely.

He was afraid of those masks, Judal knew. But why?

***

The Tale of the Last Dragon Prince (excerpt, act 4)

Hakuryuu would be his name, he decided, saying it over and over under his breath. With a name of his own, he was a man. And as it was his true name, the queen could not use it to control him. He slowly shed the robes of a princess for the breeches of a soldier. He trained in secret to become strong, although, he still cried often and uncontrollably. That he would never be able to change. 

But the sorceress-queen, still receiving bits of the future from the young augur she had kidnapped all those years ago, predicted the dragon prince’s futile coup at the last moment. As he stormed her chambers, all the divine right in heaven and earth tipping the scales of justice in his favor, the sorceress used her most powerful curse; transfiguration. 

The forces of good did not triumph that day. The prince, trapped in the form of a crow, was brutally banished from her palace in the mountains. 

***

By the next morning, the bird was doing quite a lot better. He was out of his nest, hopping about on Judal’s vanity, picking at a half-unfurled scroll. Rubbing his eyes, Judal rose, taking the scroll. “What should I do with this?”

Cawing loudly, his friend extended a wing to the floor. Obediently, Judal unrolled it. “Now what?”

The bird cawed again, nudging a bottle of ink with his beak. Judal uncapped it, and as a final measure, placed a quill beside it. A messily written letter, he recalled, from that afternoon. Urgently, the corvid fluttered to the floor, clumsily grabbing the quill with his beak, and, filling it with ink, began to write.

My name is Hakuryuu. Can I trust you?

Judal laughed. He simply couldn’t help it. “Normally I’d say no, but what the heck? You can totally trust me.”

With a few hops back to the ink, Hakuryuu was off writing again. I need you to do something and not question it.

“What? Kill a guy? I mean, I’d like to think I’d be up for that, for a pal.”

Please be serious, this is a very pressing matter. You must kiss me. I have a hunch that’s the way to break the curse I’m under. 

This time, Judal couldn’t stop laughing. “Kiss you? A bird? Where, you don’t even have lips!”

Dropping the quill, Hakuryuu pecked Judal’s leg, quieting him. “Alright, okay, this is no laughing matter,” Judal grumbled, lifting Hakuryuu in both hands, “so I just do it? Right on your beak?”

Hakuryuu cawed, impatiently. “Well, okay.” Judal sighed. He was going to do it. And, if Hakuryuu really was cursed, removing it would be a good thing. Closing his eyes, he gave Hakuryuu a cautious, small kiss on his beak... 

And found that he was kissing a pair of lips instead. Judal had never kissed anyone before. Keeping his eyelids shut tight, he leaned into the warmth of another body, someone else’s hand coming to rest on his cheek. Too soon it was over, the human who was once a bird tugging back. “I-I’m sorry about that, I didn’t mean to make it awkward or last too long.” He mumbled, the fingers of his unbroken arm tightening at the opening of his tattered silks, blue eyes like distant frozen planets darting about nervously.

“I wouldn’t be sorry if I were you.” Judal grinned, feeling his face heat. “Hakuryuu, right? So what is all this about? What… who are you?”

A wane smile crept over his bowed lips, which Judal already found himself wanted to kiss again. “It’s a very long story. And it hasn’t ended yet. But I’ll tell you the beginning if you like.”


End file.
